Paris, July, 1986, 30 year old secretary, Delphine (Marie Rivière) is thrown into sudden disarray when her friend suddenly cancels the summer vacation plans they had together. That’s a pretty crappy thing to do to your friend in general, but to do it to a French person? “That’s rough”, as Delphine would say. On paper the synopsis here seems almost pitiful, but this is a feature length film about a woman trying to fix her botched vacation plans only externally. Delphine’s quest for the perfect vacation spot is really a catalyst for an intensive psychological exploration. Delphine is frustrated and desperately seeking to unshackle herself from a strange kind of loneliness, an unfulfillment that stalks her.

Delphine begins her search for structure as soon as she is flung into this sense of overwhelming freedom now that work is out and her summer schedule is free: she meets with some acquaintances for lunch and we get the first real glimpse of her personality. Delphine is lonely. Her girlfriends chide her about this with good intentions, trying to get to the root of her issues with hopes of fixing them, but this is where Delphine’s ethereal qualities come out. Delphine has an awareness of her own character — she isn’t afraid to latch onto that and explain herself (as she does repeatedly) — but it never quite comes out fluently. She grasps at words and strings sentences together, always with desperate hand mannerisms and aloof body language. For the people in her presence listening, the reasons for her behaviour are never quite clear.

One of the girlfriends that Delphine has lunched with invites her to Cherbourg to spend summer with her family. She accepts and the real defect preventing her from happiness becomes clear: an overbearing cloud of anxiety consistently prevents Delphine from doing anything to fix this alienation from others. Social contentment is always slightly out of reach for her, but she scopes France frantically for it at three different holiday resorts during this one summer, her emotional baggage following everywhere and stooping her in discontented isolation.

There are two striking scenes of physical repulsion in response to difficult social situations for Delphine during her summer ventures: Delphine makes her Cherbourgh friend pass on a message to her friends and family that she wishes to leave their temporary holiday home immediately; the rumination of how they might react to such innocuous news has her literally run away so that she doesn’t have to bear their reaction. Her peers have good intentions, but their character and interests conflict with Delphine’s own, and feeling like a contrarian amongst them, she ostracises herself in order to prevent awkward social dissonance. Later at a beach resort Delphine makes friends with an extroverted Swedish girl. At a café, the friend invites two men to sit with them and the Swede’s ability to instantly make natural bonds through charming, trivial conversation is unbearable for Delphine. The absurdity of the shallow small-talk that adults are using to flirt with each other is too much for her. She sits in silence and contemplates the chinwagging that she’s unable to contribute towards, only to again sprint away from an uncomfortable encounter in maudlin despair.

Delphine’s inability to connect is constantly causing her emotional outbursts such as this, and though they are more reactionary than how your average kindred spirit of Delphine would act, they’re understandable responses that make sense to her sympathisers. Not many people in the real world would display such audacious behaviour, but Marie Rivière is an unabashed emotionally insufferable icon and couldn’t care less about containing her self and abiding by social niceties. The actress not the character is mentioned here because of the film’s improvised nature which Rivière significantly contributed towards. I once read on a message board that while she was introducing a screening of this film in Paris, Rivière came across, in real life, as very similar to Delphine.

Alienation is the film’s centrepiece but it never detracts or prevents the full vivacity of summer from having a prevalent presence adjunct to Delphine’s plight. Rohmer is the master of seasonal filmmaking and Le Rayon vert is his most immersive summer film. All the intrinsic sights and sounds of summer are carefully considered and presented, the birds, the insects and the sight of half-naked people treating city landmarks as sunbathing spots. Delphine’s physical environment doesn’t react to her mood but works as an objective neighbour; the full gaiety of summer taking place around Delphine only emphasises her condition.

Ceaseless travel across France for spiritual resolution shows Delphine is not a defeatist victim of her emotional plight, but a luminary of hope. The unmitigated freedom of summer has put her on a long and solitary journey which she is frantically trying to solve. Signs of green are littered throughout the film, in signs, posters and playing cards. When the signs show the film begins to play its only source of non-diegetic music, an eerie string piece that expands upon the strange sensation of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (noticing repeatedly something recently discovered) in regards to Le Rayon vert, a term Delphine overhears a group of bibliophiles speaking of at the beach. Green signs are the most ambiguous aspect of the film and seem to work on either two levels: coincidences that Delphine is willing herself to see in order to make sense of the disarray and lack of purpose that sudden freedom has bestowed upon her or a liberating awareness of a fatalistic plan guiding her to a life of ostensible normality.

Ultimately these signs work as a path that lead to a transcendental moment for our absurd hero. Delphine takes control of her situation, initiates a date with a man, and while sharing a tender moment together on a hill, the green ray its self beams and enshrouds Delphine with a brisk moment of clarity. She has willed herself to be where she is at that moment, ending the film on a frisson inducing sense of hope. Everything has fallen into place, and the world is laid out before her as a crucible of opportunity.